Rice plant disease classification using color features: a machine learning paradigm

In traditional practices, detection of rice plant diseases by experts is a subjective matter whereas by testing in the laboratory is time-consuming. As a consequence, it causes reduction on agricultural production and economic loss to farmers. To overcome this, there is a demand to develop fast and effective systems to detect and classify rice plant diseases. Therefore, the development of image-based automated systems for classification of rice plant diseases is an interesting growing research area in the agriculture domain. Color is one of the important features to classify rice plant diseases. In this study, we have presented an image-based rice plant disease classification approach using color features only. We have explored 14 different color spaces and extracted four features from each color channel leading to 172 features. Moreover, the performance of seven different classifiers have been compared and demonstrated that a highest classification accuracy of 94.65% has been achieved using support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Training and testing of models were performed on the dataset that consists of 619 images. This dataset was collected from the real agriculture field that belongs to four classes: (a) Bacterial Leaf Blight (BLB), (b) Rice Blast (RB), (c) Sheath Blight (SB) and (d) Healthy Leave (HL). The encouraging results of this paper show that color features can play an important role in developing rice plant disease classification system and enable the farmers to take preventive measures resulting in better product quality and quantity.